America’s Empire Is Ending Much Like Spain’s Did
As the US celebrates its 250th, it has begun to resemble the decadent Spanish Empire it replaced: producing nothing while collecting rents, sacrificing its interior to enrich a bloated elite, and embracing exclusionary nationalism to exploit its underclass.
Diego Velázquez’s 1635 painting The Surrender of Breda depicts the Spanish General Ambrogio Spinola graciously accepting the keys to the Dutch town in 1625. This moment was the crowning achievement of imperial Spain’s so-called Annus Mirabilis.
An often forgotten historical truth about the American Revolution is the crucial role that Spain played in providing financing, logistical support, and supplies. As Greg Grandin details in America, América, in late 1776, Benjamin Franklin entered secret talks with the Bourbon Court to plead support for the revolutionaries’ cause. Spain eventually agreed, sending envoys “to manage the distribution of its aid, supplying the Continental Army with blankets, boots, gunpowder, and other necessities.” By 1779, Spain itself had declared war on England, launching naval campaigns up the Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast.
In 1782, at the negotiations that eventually produced the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish diplomat the Count of Aranda was among the first to recognize the Crown’s strategic blunder. Spain would have been better off, Aranda argued, had they left England and its colonists to fight one another. Instead it had financed a power that would eventually threaten its possessions in Florida, New Orleans, and Mexico. Today the United States has a lot in common with the declining Spanish Empire that it eventually replaced.
A Golden Age?
In the century before, Diego Velázquez’s 1635 painting The Surrender of Breda depicts the Spanish General Ambrogio Spinola graciously accepting the keys to the Dutch town in 1625. This moment was the crowning achievement of imperial Spain’s so-called Annus Mirabilis. In the span of just a few months, King Philip IV’s forces achieved a string of stunning military victories: relieving Genoa, defending Cádiz, recapturing Bahia, and winning a ten-month siege at Breda. This proved to the Habsburg Court that Spain had shaken off the cobwebs of the Twelve Years’ Truce, leading royal favorite Gaspar de Guzmán the Count-Duke of Olivares (who led a notoriously hawkish faction) to pen one of the most famous pronouncements from early modern history: “God is Spanish and fights for Spain.”
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